alt Hacker NewsEverything was slower though. Turkey as a whole country had one 9600bps link to Bitnet at the time. Internet was accessed through Bitnet gateways. Systems (CPUs and I/O in general) were also much slower.
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icedchai • 11/04/2025
Much slower. Most campuses in the US were connected with 56K dedicated lines. The NSF backbone had just upgraded to T1.
hinkley • 11/04/2025
ftp.wustl.edu would manage about 1 KBps and I was sitting one hop away from it at UIUC.
Insomnia paid off a lot back then.
Slower and unstable. I spent a lot of my freshman year in college on Bitnet chat and iirc about every 30 minutes there would be a "netsplit" and a bunch of folks in the chat would disappear. Maybe it was our universities connection, which I think was direct to UIUC. I've posted here before that back then I thought Bitnet chat was magical. Things like being in a chat room with students in Berlin while the wall was falling felt so futuristic to me.